Can You See the IRS Scandal Now?

Scandal Watch: More than a year after the IRS Tea Party targeting story broke, internal emails show what all the lying and stonewalling was about. Will Democrats and the press now admit that this is a serious scandal?

A year after Judicial Watch submitted its FOIA request the IRS coughed up a stack of emails. Among them is a July 2010 exchange between IRS director Holly Paz and a top D.C.-based IRS lawyer, Steve Grodnitzky, in which the latter explains how his Washington office "is working the Tea Party applications in coordination with" an office in Cincinnati.

Not only was the effort being directed out of Washington, the emails reveal, but D.C. was also telling the Cincinnati office how to handle Tea Party applications.

The emails also expose intense pressure from Sen. Carl Levin to block these groups in the run-up to the presidential election.

This all runs directly counter to repeated claims by top IRS that the targeting was entirely due to low-level "rogue agents" in Cincinnati.

At one point, Lois Lerner, who was then director of the IRS Exempt Organization office, even said there was a perfectly innocent explanation for the fact that Tea Party groups had their nonprofit status held up for years. It was all just a misguided effort to come up with an efficient means of dealing with a flood of tax-exempt applications between 2010 and 2012, she said.

In the many months since, the IRS has alternately lied to the public and stonewalled a congressional investigation, while Democrats — from Obama on down — worked feverishly to claim that there wasn't any targeting of conservative groups at all.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, for example, took the unusual step last year of attacking the Treasury inspector general who uncovered the targeting, charging that his work was "fundamentally flawed." They pointed to IRS documents that, they said, showed the IRS wasn't singling out conservative groups at all.

"This new information should put a nail in the coffin of the Republican claims that the IRS's actions were politically motivated or were targeted at only one side of the political spectrum," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on that committee.

The media, not surprisingly, jumped on Cummings' claim as a reason to dismiss the story.

But then the IG pointed out that while a handful of liberal groups did get extra scrutiny for their tax-exempt applications, 100% of Tea Party affiliated groups had been held hostage by the IRS.

Meanwhile, after President Obama's initial expression of outrage at the partisan IRS targeting, and promise to get to the bottom of it, his own Justice Department did next to nothing in the following months.

And as recently as this April, Think Progress, a left-wing group closely allied with the White House, claimed that its review of IRS documents proved that, if anything, the agency had targeted liberal groups more aggressively than Tea Party ones.

"IRS records indicate that at least some additional scrutiny was required for groups of all types that had names that sounded political — and that the explicit heightened scrutiny for left-leaning groups was even longer-standing than for Tea Party groups," it claimed.

Obama himself dismissed the entire scandal, asserting there "were some bone-headed decisions out of a local (IRS) office," but there was "not even a smidgen of corruption."

Throughout, the mainstream press showed a studied indifference to the whole affair, even though the application delays kept dozens of Tea Party groups on ice when their mobilizing efforts might have made a difference in the election outcome.

Now, with so many lies exposed and with no more excuses left, will reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post and the major TV networks finally start giving the IRS scandal the Watergate-level of attention it deserves? Or will they continue to help the administration cover it all up?

See Also

Politics: The White House has denounced an anti-abortion group's videos of Planned Parenthood's activities as "fraudulent" and circled its wagons to defend the indefensible. What kind of White House is this?For an institution that might argue that it doesn't have a dog in this fight, the White ...

Iran Deal: After initially refusing, the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency will brief senators Wednesday. Are its nuclear monitoring practices kept secret because they're inadequate?Yukiya Amano, the director general of the IAEA, until Friday was refusing to brief senators on ...

Corruption: The third installment of released emails fell hard Friday on the Hillary Clinton campaign. If her candidacy lasts until the end of the summer, there's much more wrong with this country than we thought.Friday had to be an extraordinarily trying day for the Democratic front-runner. On the ...

Regulation: As businesses struggle to stay open and lay off workers, the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing one of the biggest hiring binges in America outside of Google. Good news? Hardly.Barack Obama's EPA has announced it will try to hire 800 new regulators over the next several ...

Taxes Vs. Prosperity: The Real Wedge Issue Ronald Reagan died 11 years ago, and his presidency ended a quarter century ago. But my, how his tax-cutting ideas live on. The living legacy of Reaganomics, or supply-side economics, is that tax rates keep falling all over the world. Imitation really is ...

About Investor's Business Daily

Investor’s Business Daily provides exclusive stock lists, investing data, stock market research, education and the latest financial and business news to help investors make more money in the stock market. All of IBD’s products and features are based on the CAN SLIM® Investing System developed by IBD’s Founder William J. O’Neil, who identified the seven common characteristics that winning stocks display before making huge price gains. Each letter of CAN SLIM represents one of those traits.

Select market data is provided by Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services. Price and Volume data is delayed 20 minutes unless otherwise noted, is believed accurate but is not warranted or guaranteed by Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services and is subject to Interactive Data Corp. Real Time Services terms. All times are Eastern United States. *Reflects real-time index prices.